Classification of data into classes or categories is an often-performed function. One example of such data classification is text classification, which can be used to automatically assign natural language texts into a number of predefined thematic categories. An example of such text classification is email classification at a help desk—email messages are received and are automatically classified into predefined categories so that they can be better responded-to by the help desk staff.
However, the performance of current classification systems can be lacking, especially in situations where the data is noisy (e.g., where the data includes portion(s) that are not useful for classification). Thus, it would be beneficial to improve the performance of classification systems, and thus improve how well data is classified by such systems.